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Fun Palaces are creative, cultural, but above all community events taking place worldwide on the weekend of 6 and 7 October. This year the RAS is joining in, along with Creativity and Curiosity.

Make Space! takes place at Burlington House on Saturday 6 October from 12–5. All are welcome to get creative with space science as a theme. You can contemplate comets, make Moon craters and scale the solar system, repair the International Space Station (not quite for real) and create a space future with art – and there's a talk from the Creativity and Curiosity team of artists for inspiration.

Fun Palaces are grass-roots events in which participants drive activities in ways that stimulate their own creativity.  They were conceived in the 1960s by actor and director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price, who imagined a building where creativity, art and science came together. Now Fun Palaces are more virtual than concrete, appearing on one weekend a year in welcoming local spaces worldwide – 2017 saw 362 of them, involving 126,000 people. And Fun. Palaces have become a powerful movement advocating culture – arts, sciences, heritage, craft, tech, digital, sports and more – for all, to quote from their manifesto: "We believe in the genius in everyone, in everyone an artist and everyone a scientist, and that creativity in community can change the world for the better. We believe we can do this together, locally, with radical fun – and that anyone, anywhere, can make a Fun Palace." Fun Palaces provide a way for people to come together and explore culture, ideas and, in the case of Make Space! at the RAS, space itself.

Astronomy and space science are fruitful areas for exploring creativity, as the artists working on Creativity and Curiosity have demonstrated. Ione Parkin, Alison Lochhead and Gillian McFarland displayed some of their work funded by an RAS Grant at the 2016 NAM and wrote about their exploration of creativity in arts and sciences in A&G. At Making Space! McFarland and Parkin, together with book artist Kate Bernstein, will talk about this cross-cultural collaboration and maybe inspire new connections, in the spirit of Fun Palaces. It's all free to attend, but you need to register for a ticket for the Creativity and Curiosity talk. 

Come along and create something at Make Space! at the RAS.